Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery Published Books

Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story

"This beautiful, wise and wonderfully practical book addresses the central fact of human life: we live in language as fish live in water. Dennis Slattery is a master teacher of the arts of writing and connecting with the poetry that lies at the basis of the mind and of the world. His long experience working and teaching the rites of language helps enable each of us to recover the lost speech that so many people are seeking. It is hard to overstate the importance of this work—psychologically, spiritually and even politically. Read this book and learn to live fully in your own body, the body of language, and the body of the world."-Tom Cheetham, author of After Prophecy

Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy

Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy is a series of meditations, one for each day of the year, using between 6-9 lines of the poem for each entry. The book is comprised of approximately 121 entries for each of the canticas Dante created: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Following each quote from the poem is a short summary of what is taking place at this moment in the pilgrimage. Then follows a reflection on what this might have to do with our lives today. At the bottom of each page is a Writing Meditation in which the reader is invited to journal how this passage might apply to them now or in his/her past. Through these writing meditations, the reader will uncover parts of his/her personal myth.

The Beauty Between Words

The Beauty Between Words is a co-authored series of poems by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Chris Paris. It contains essays by both poets on the nature of their craft, the nature of poetry as each understands it, as well as a Foreword by poet Stephanie Pope. In her Foreword she suggests that the poems in this volume remind her of "the language of jazz; the language of soul food is at work. I'm suggesting The Beauty Between Words is jazz poetry." Cover art is by John Fergus-Jean.

Reimagining Education: Essays On Reviving the Soul of Learning

Reimagining Education: Essays On Reviving the Soul of Learning, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Jennifer Selig, as well as essays by them and16 other teachers, was inspired by the flat and anemic language of &ldquo;no child left behind&rdquo; as a fix-it phrase for what ails education in America today. The essays respond to that language by reinstilling a place of Eros and imagination into the classroom, either through a theoretical articulation of what might revitalize learning or by a praxis-oriented essay that reveals what individual teachers do with their students and the subject matter they gather around. Together, this series of responses offer a new language by which to speak about the mystery and joy of learning.

Varieties of Mythic Experience

This new collection of essays edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Glen Slater, represents the first volume written by faculty from one program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. In it, each faculty member presents an article from his/her discipline, along with a short introduction in which the author states his/her angle on mythology. Taken together, these essays reveal the wide and deep diverse level of scholarship as well as offers a panoramic view of the program's strengths.

Just Below the Water Line

These selected poems attempt to discover the voice of the poetic imagination as they look at the common, the ordinary, the often-unnoticed objects and events in the world. Their aim is to seek out what lies just below the water line of perceptual reality and to give that form a voice, a structure, a language, so it may speak through itself. Reading the poems aloud adds a quality of sonority to them that enlivens the image further.

Casting the Shadows

"Dennis Patrick Slattery's work has focused through the years on the poetic nature of the psyche as it is embodied in the world. His interests include finding the interstices between human embodiment, spiritual contemplation and poetic utterance such that the psyche can reveal herself in all her multiple folds, lineaments and forms."

Harvsting Darkness: Essays on Literature, Myth, Film and Culture

"As Dennis Patrick Slattery's writing shows, the very stuff of the great traditions is life itself, and the hurly-burly of current culture is the ground in which tradition thrives. Slattery's analyses are keen and thoughtful, often scholarly, and always deeply spiritual. But they are better for being a bit pugnacious and intimate and virile. They give evidence of a life lived in earnest, one in which nothing is walled off into a cagegory but all enters into the whole that is the mysterious grounding of the person."

Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic

"In this powerful book, travel along with Dennis Patrick Slattery as he sets off on a three-month pilgrimage, during which he struggles with his identity; his role as a father and husband, teacher and believer; as well as the life and death of his father. Throughout his stays at twelve monasteries and retreat centers, Slattery seeks the refuge of the monastic life where silence and solitude open an extraordinary window on the human soul. Against the backdrop of Slattery's personal story, Grace in the Desert offers vivid descriptions of monastic life and practice at Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers."

Psychology at the Threshold. Edited by Lionel Corbett and Dennis Patrick Slattery

"Psychology at the Threshold, which represents in its 25 offerings only a fraction of the presentations at the International Conference held at The University of California, Santa Barbara in the summer of 2000, nonetheless pulls a diverse range of voices together in order to explore the impulses, desires and motions of archetypal psychology's perspectives. From it new ideas and images are nudged across the Threshold into a fuller consciousness, there to be entertained, challenged and modified by the reader's own sense of psyche's unique possibilities. Drawing from the imaginations of therapists, teachers, social and community action workers, artists, scientists, medical personnel, physicists, artists, this volume's intention is to identify and explore trends for psychology and social action in the 21st. century."

Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field Edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Lionel Corbett

"Developed in the spirit of C.G. Jung, and extended by the work of James Hillman, Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field grows directly from the soil of the Romantic Movement of the 19th century, itself a rebellion against the legacy of Enlightenment fundamentalism, which emphasized the literal reality of the world, and feasted on Measurement and the quantification of all knowledge. These essays build on the observation outlined by Jung in his provocative introduction to The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature: "Since it is a characteristic of the psyche not only to be the source of all productivity but, more especially, to express itself in all the activities and achievements of the human mind, we can nowhere grasp the nature of the psyche per se but can meet it only in its various manifestations". We believe the essays in this volume honor the spirit of Jung's regard for the psyche's diverse expressions."

The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh"Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.

An almost obsessive interest in the human body in literary and psychological theory over the past ten years has uncovered not just the physical body but the body as metaphor, political emblem, social construction, and symptom.

The Wounded Body builds on this recent interest in the body by providing an ambitious interdisciplinary exploration of the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison. Guided by insights from phenomenology to Jungian archetypal psychology, Dennis Slattery argues that the body in its scarred, marked, diseased, tattooed, or otherwise afflicted state is not only an individual phenomenon but, in the hands of the poet, a cultural symptom, a place of suffering, as well as a way of seeing and ordering the experience of the one who is wounded."

"In Dostoevsky's novel, The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is more an angelic spirit than he is a man; he is a complex metaphor for fantasy, a mode of consciousness that is divorced from the earth and one which envisions human nature as univocal, unified, innocent, and free from contradiction. Drawing on phenomenology to interrogate those common human dimensions of lived space and temporality, the study examines The Idiot to articulate the way in which fantasy offers not an imagined eschatology rooted in the human order, but rather a futile design to imparadise a world already fallen. For diseased, Dostoevsky's prince is a presence that reminds the community of what is absent."